Sunday, September 04, 2016

Trump's triumph in Detroit

Tomorrow is Labor Day. Is the race over already? Did Trump's speech at a black church in Detroit turn the tide and set Republicans up for a tsunami in November?

Let us look at the facts.
Two months ago, Dilbert creator Scott Adams summed up Trump's No. 1 problem: race. Democrats have been calling Republicans racist since Barry Goldwater -- an actual racist -- ran in 1964 and took five segregated Southern states and his home state of Arizona. I maintain that Goldwater actually hurt Reagan ready was a national figure without him. Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, putting him in company with Bob Byrd.

But while Trump has defined Clinton as crooked, the Clinton campaign has put together an impressive confirmation bias case that Trump is a racist. As I have described in prior posts, none of the “evidence” is real. Trump talks about other countries, illegal immigrants, and religion. He has no proposals about race. But the facts are not important to politics. Never have been, never will. What matters is that the Clinton side – including parts of the media – have branded Trump a racist, and it is sticking.

Now then, getting rid of that stain is hard. Republicans have tried and tried.

But Trump was up to the task. First, he set himself up as the law-and-order candidate. Liberals have long called law-and-order a dog whistle for racism. But he openly and defiantly blew it, and waited for the opportunity which he knew would come.

When a small sliver of African-Americans rioted in Milwaukee, Trump went to Wisconsin and gave his pitch to black voters: What the hell do you have to lose by voting for me? Make America Great Again would bring jobs to black people as well as white people. And law-and-order helps black people, because it is not the white people who see their CVS pharmacies torched.

He struck a chord. After five decades of Great Society programs, nearly half the people in prison in our nation are black. But the real problem is nearly half the crime victims in America are black, because crime is the last segregated industry in America. Rare is white-on-black or black-on-white crime. The tragedy for people of color is not the men in prison, but the men in graveyards -- put there by men of their own race.

Trump chose one of the whitest towns in Wisconsin to make that speech. Commentators said great speech, wrong audience.

Brilliant, I said that at the time. Once again the pundits were wrong. He made his pitch for black votes before a white audience in order to establish credibility. He also got his enemies in punditry to call his speech a great speech, which it was.

He gave the same speech again in one of the whitest towns in Michigan. His message to African-Americans was no, seriously, this is what I mean by law and order and making America great again. He was showing people his sincerity and seriousness by not saying one thing to whites and another thing to black people.

On Saturday, finally, he spoke to a black church in Detroit. In that church, he shed the label of racism.

This was forty years in the making. Trump began his career by mimicking his father, who believed in segregated housing. His father was wrong, and Trump caught on quick. He has spent some of his life working with black people, getting to know them, and trying to see what their dreams are.

Guess what? Their dreams are no different from white people. We all want a purpose in life and the love of our families and friends.

By delivering the same speech to different audiences, Trump is bringing people together. Guess what, my fellow white people, black people hate crime too.

He just made law-and-order a black cause. He will make it a Latino one as well. That's what leaders do.

Hillary should worry. She needs the black vote. Republicans can win without the black vote. Democrats can't. One-quarter of their votes come from black people. Trump indeed will siphon some of those must-get votes. This will show in a lower turnout of black votes as well as an increase in Republican market share.

I tweeted last year that thirty years from now, Republicans will have quit looking for the next Reagan and will look for the next Trump instead. This is an example of why.

As I remember Goldwater and some other Republicans were mostly concerned that the civil rights acts, as written, would remove the right of the proprietors to control their own property (i.e. stores, rentals, etc.). Goldwater's position wasn't due to the color of prospective patrons' skin (nor even their character).The problem some of the Republicans saw is being testified to today by the forcing of Christian shopkeepers and photographers to bake cakes, take jobs involving same-sex unions. (Note that the political and legal powers are not brought to bear on Muslim bakeries for the same refusals - see Stephen Crowder's youtube vids.)

Great column, Donald! You are exactly correct, "Republicans can win without the black vote. Democrats can't. One-quarter of their votes come from black people." When The Donald gets those black votes, it'll be all over for the Demorats!

@Anon 12:37PM- If Trump loses, there won't be a Republican party anymore, so it won't matter if they learn from the experience. For that matter, our country will be lost too, and the whole USA will be "Californ-ized" into a third world country, where no right-winger will ever be elected to national office again.

@Sam L.- I too am not at all convinced that Goldwater was a racist; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, and still is, unConstitutional. It may have done some good, but that is controversial; much better if our freedom of association had not been destroyed, which gave an enormous boost to government meddling in our lives.

Such votes on principle depend on using rational reasoned arguments to defend the vote.

Things such as the Civil Rights Act are purely emotional to people. You want to stand on Constitutional principle with the Interstate Trucking Registration Act of 2016? Go right ahead.

You want to stand on principle against the "Make Me and Mine a Full Citizen Act of 2016?"

There is something that many Constitutional Conservatives seem to either not know or to just ignore:

(1) Facts are important only in implementing policy and unimportant in selling policy.

(2) The selling of Policy is called Politics and is based on emotion.

(3) The sooner the Right learns the differences between Policy and Politics the Better - and I hope to God that the mast salesman, marketer, and promoter has given a lesson in selling that the GOP will finally heed.

You clearly did not read what I wrote; if you did you clearly are incapable of understanding or choose not to understand the difference between Policy and Politics, reason and emotion, sales and implementation.

I don't understand this repeated libeling of the 1964 Barry Goldwater. The 1990's Goldwater was an aging retrogade, but 1964 Goldwater would have made an excellent president.

He was NOT a racist. His opposition to CRA 1964 was not based on racism but on a well-reasoned analysis based on federalism, and that's how he explained it, even if that opposition did garner him some votes of actual racists.

What's more, though no one will acknowledge it, CRA 1964 has largely proved a disaster, and Goldwater was right to oppose it.

Is the spawn of CRA 1964 -- today's militantly anti-white, militantly redistributionist racial-set aside politically correct civil rights establishment any better or any less destructive than the "white racism" that it was supposed to eradicate?

Is there less racial tension today than there was before CRA 1964?

No, CRA 1964 just raised expectations and the Voting Rights Act created the first one-party interest group based on group identity.

Look at how large numbers of young African Americans conduct themselves today -- the high levels of dropouts, criminality, drug addiction, illegitimacy. It's all a product of "civil rights".

African Americans would have done better to have adopted Booker T. Washington's model for liberation by making economic independence more of a priority than mere political equality.

Your comments on Goldwater are very disappointing, Don. He voted yes on both the 1957 and 1960 versions of the Civil Rights Bill, and integrated the Arizona National Guard. From Urban Legends, and other easily verifiable sources:

"As a matter of fact, as one of the six voting against the 1964 Civil rights act, Senator Goldwater, on principle, disagreed with the idea of Federal government intervention regarding this matter. “His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and, second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose.”[3]

As proven by gubment persecution of folks like the bakers who didn't want to be forced into baking a cake for a gay wedding, I would say Goldwater's stance on federal interference has proven to be very prescient. Perhaps by being raised in a Cleveland Democrat environment you were misinformed, but Goldwater was no racist, not by any stretch of the imagination. The racist in that whole historical scenario was LBJ who is infamously reputed, by two Democrat Southern governors no less, to have said said "We'll have those niggers voting Democrat for 200 years."

"I am unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color, or creed, or on any other basis; not only my words, but more importantly my actions through the years have repeatedly demonstrated the sincerity of my feeling in this regard.

This is fundamentally a matter of the heart. The problems of discrimination can never by cured by laws alone; but I would be the first to agree that laws can help--laws carefully considered and weighed in an atmosphere of dispassion, in the absence of political demagoguery, and in the light of fundamental constitutional principles.

For example, throughout my 12 years as a member of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, I have repeatedly offered amendments to bills pertaining to labor that would end discrimination in unions, and repeatedly those amendments have been turned down by the very members of both parties who now so vociferously support the present approach to the solution of our problem. Talk is one thing, action is another, and until the members of this body and the people of this country realize this, there will be no real solution to the problem we fact.

To be sure, a calm environment for the consideration of any law dealing with human relationships is not easily attained--emotions run high, political pressures become great, and objectivity is at a premium. Nevertheless, deliberation and calmness are indispensable to success.

It was in this context that I maintained high hopes for this current legislation--high hopes that, notwithstanding the glaring defects of the measure as it reached us from the other body and the sledge-hammer political tactics which produced it, this legislation, through the actions of what was once considered the greatest deliberative body on earth, would emerge in a form both effective for its lofty purposes and acceptable to all freedom-loving people.

It is with great sadness that I realize the non-fulfillment of these high hopes. My hopes were shattered when it became clear that emotion and political pressure, not persuasion, not common sense, not deliberation, had become the rule of the day and of the processes of this great body.

One has only to review the defeat of common sense amendments to this bill--amendments that would in no way harm it but would, in fact, improve it--to realize that political pressure, not persuasion or common sense, has come to rule the consideration of this measures.

I realize fully that the Federal Government has a responsibility in the field of civil rights. I supported the civil rights bills which were enacted in 1957 and 1960, and my public utterances during the debates on those measures and since reveal clearly the areas in which I feel Federal responsibility lies and Federal legislation on this subject can be both effective and appropriate. Many of those areas are encompassed in this bill and to that extent, I favor it.

I wish to make myself perfectly clear. The two portion so this bill to which I have constantly and consistently voiced objections, and which are of such overriding significance that they are determinative of my vote on the entire measure, are those which would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action in the area of so-called "public accommodations" and in the area of employment--to be precise, Titles II and VII of the bill. I find no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in either of these areas; and I believe the attempted usurpation of such power to be a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government, namely, that of a constitutional government in which 50 sovereign states have reserved to themselves and to the people those powers not specifically granted to the central or Federal Government...

If it is the wish of the American people that the Federal Government should be granted the power to regulate in these two areas and in the manner contemplated by this bill, then I say the Constitution should be so amended as to authorize such action in accordance with the procedures for amending the Constitution which that great document itself prescribes.

I say further that for this great legislative body to ignore the Constitution and the fundamental concepts of our governmental system is to act in a manner which could ultimately destroy the freedom of all American citizens, including the freedoms of the very persons whose feelings and whose liberties are the major subject of this legislation.

My basic objection to this measure is, therefore, constitutional, but in addition I would like to point out to my colleagues in the Senate and to the people of America, regardless of their race, color or creed, the implications involved in the enforcement of regulatory legislation of this sort. To give genuine effect to the prohibitions of the bill will require the creation of a Federal police force of mammoth proportions. It also bids fair to result in the development of an "informer" psychology in great areas of our national life--neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businesses, where those who would harass their fellow citizens for selfish and narrow purposes will have ample inducement to do so.

These, the Federal police force and an "informer" psychology, are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society.

I repeat again: I am unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort and I believe that though the problem is fundamentally one of the heart, some law can help--but not law that embodies features like these, provisions which fly in the face of the Constitution and which require for their effective execution the creation of a police state. And so, because I am unalterably opposed to any threats to our great system of government and the loss of our God-given liberties, I shall vote "No" on this bill.This vote will be reluctantly cast, because I had hoped to be able to vote "Yea" on this measure as I have on the civil right bills which have preceded it; but I cannot in good conscience to the oath that I took when assuming office, cast my vote in the affirmative. With the exception of Titles II and VII, I could wholeheartedly support this bill; but with their inclusion, not measurably improved by the compromise version we have been working on, my vote must by "No".

If my vote is misconstrued, let it be, and let me suffer its consequences. Just let me be judged in this by the real concern I have voiced here and not by words that others may speak or by what others may say about what I think.

My concern extends beyond this single legislative moment. My concern extends beyond any single group in our society. My concern is for the entire Nation, for the freedom of all who live in it and for all who will be born into it."

FAKE NEWS FOLLIES OF 2017

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About Me

I live in Poca, West Virginia, with my lovely wife of 40 years, Lou Ann. I am an Army veteran and Cleveland State graduate. I retired after 40 years as a newspaperman. In 2016, I published "Trump the Press," which drew rave reviews at Power Line and Instapundit.